ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Comparitive safety: UK vs. Elsewhere

Haha! I found at least three electric items on the list (look for voltage, DIY, plug).

It's funny really: The Swedish population is more EU-sceptical than the British but the press is rather positive. The Brits, while more positive, has a press that is extremely critical.

Sometimes. The problem is that they also come up with things which nobody wants and which are a solution looking for a problem.

Take the Federally imposed seatbelt interlock fiasco of the 1970s, for example. The Feds mandated that all new cars be fitted with an interlock to prevent the engine from being started until the driver's belt was buckled. The whole concept was so ridiculous and unpopular that the law lasted only a few months and the govt. was forced to repeal it and allow dealers to disable those cars already fitted with it (although by all accounts most had already been bypassed by their owners).

Is that possible?

I think my views on the EU as a whole are well-known, and I don't want to stray into politics, but quite a lot of the entries on that Euromyths site don't give the full story (e.g. metrication). Some pieces of legislation were averted at the last minute, but the threat was very real at one time.

There are also several items listed as "myths" which the site actually confirms are true, such as the infamous Fire exit signs law.

I'll concede that there is also a lot of nonsense spouted by the media, such as the "everybody will have to rewire their house" garbage, but don't you think that is at least part-fueled by the very real regulations which are overly restrictive?



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 02-17-2005).]

Not really, have a look at UK domesticly produced regulations and they'd make anything the EU has ever produced look like it was produced by a bunch of hippies!

For example, the "metric marters" ... the British Government decided to implement that approach to going metric. The EU never required anything remotely as harsh as that.

There are a few harmonisation measures that were always going to be tedious to introduce. e.g. the current change of 3-phase cable colour but, they're necessary.

By the way, on the 3-phase cable colour issue. This change should have happened decades ago, but I guess it had to happen sometime!
The colours used, from a safety point of view do kind of make sense too. Especially considering that 3-phase is found in a lot of European homes. At least with brown, grey and black consumers can quickly identify dark coloured cables as likely to be phase.

The other approach is the German way: "The machine is subject to the following German regulations:

EN...
EN...
ISO...
ANSI...."

It's not the official German stance in any way, it's just the little guys writing the manuals who feels that if it is a standard, it must be German.

I just have to tell you something funny: One of our customers have outsourced _management_ to a foreign company. The plant and workers are still employees, it just the managers who have been replaced with Italians. They now place orders in Italian! Yes really!

Quite a lot of EN standards get directly turned into IS (Irish Standard) numbers to make them compulsary here. All they do is prefix the EN number with IS

So EN 2222:1978 would become ISEN 2222:1978

You also get ISO 9000 issued by the NSAI as IS 9000

To give you an example (from the ETCI [eletrotechnical council of ireland]'s website)

Q: Are there special plugs and sockets for outdoor installations and if so why?
A: Yes. We like most mainland Europe countries do not consider indoor plugs to be suitable for outdoor installations subject to weather and rough handling and so ordinary 13A sockets to I.S. 401 are not suitable for outdoor use. Like all socket outlets up to 32A, they should be protected by an RCD. The Rules require that outdoor sockets and industrial sockets comply with *IS/EN60309* standard. In this system both the plug and socket are hard wearing and are deemed to be suitable for outdoor use. The single phase plug is coloured blue and the socket is inclined towards the ground to prevent the ingress of moisture. They may be more cumbersome than the flat pin plug system but they are safer.


[This message has been edited by djk (edited 02-18-2005).]

LOL! I wonder what they think the "A" in ANSI stands for?

Such as part P?

Sure, the Whitehall bureaucrats come up with plenty of their own nonsensical legislation too. I'll also concede that in plenty of cases they've also misinterpreted EU directives or gone completely overboard in transposing them into British law. There was one case a few years ago (I forget the topic) where it was discovered that a 2-page EU directive written in very broad and vague terms had finally come out of the Whitehall machine as over 80 pages of densely packed regulations adding all sorts of extra restrictions which were never specified in the original.

I still don't see why this change was necessary. Does it matter if a British building uses a different color code to one in Greece or Finland? I certainly don't see how this can be classed as a safety issue (and in fact I have already heard of one incident in which somebody mixed up blue and black and put a phase on the neutral bus, so if anything it is causing problems).

I wouldn't be so sure about all the phase colors being dark either. I've seen new cable in which the gray is fairly light and the blue is rather dark (whatever happened to that earlier specification that neutral should be light blue?).

If there is a genuine need to change something for safety, then fine, but it seems that a lot of changes now are done purely for the sake of "harmonization."

Take the fire exit signs. Do you really think our places of work are any safer for having the new pictogram versions?

The argument that with cross-border workers it's necessary for "Health & Safety" doesn't make much sense. Anybody who can manage to speak enough English to be able to work in the U.K. surely isn't going to have too much trouble learning that "EXIT" means sortie, Ausgang, salida, or whatever it happens to be in their native language.

It wouldn't have been quite so bad had the requirement been just for new signs to include the symbol. To dictate that every office, factory, hotel, restaurant, etc. in the country must rip out their existing, perfectly good "FIRE EXIT" signs and replace them with the new ones at a cost of millions was just crazy.

On the fire exit thing. Yes absolutely!

There are many incidences where people in a work place or a hotel don't understand the local language.

If you saw a non-standard greek fire exit sign in Greek on say a blue background you wouldn't have a clue what it meant! Or try Hungarian!

You can still have EXIT, SORTIE, Ausgang or whatever you want on the sign provided it still has the green background and the pictogram.

As for the neutral colour it's poor quality control!

I can't see that as a major problem!

[This message has been edited by djk (edited 02-18-2005).]